M. Cole. The Carry-troubled waters. 2011. Acrylic on canvas.11"x14"
Usually the narrative of a painting in the West goes as a written page, from left to right... At the left the past, at the right the future... action tends to go forward.
In The Carry-troubled waters, the river rapids stormed the left of the picture, starting in a higher right ground....Believing that no image is such by chance when painting in a complete channeled way, I pondered what it was showing about my world at this point.
No stagnant waters of resentment, no idle pond of complacent memories but a turmoiled mass of water running....The stormy waters of future rushing in, forcing change, washing out the past. A brutal redemption. Rocks were my first subject in this new period, then a peaceful mass of water seen from far up high, then thundering surf and the gentle trickling of a waterfall... then breaking surf on a sandy shore and this carry have displaced the subject to water in motion....life seems to have started to warm up motors.
The resentment and wounds of the past will mess up a lot more than the present and cancel more than the future when a person becomes obsessed with all the wrong -real or imaginary-that has received, when the yet-to-come is regarded with fear. Sometimes it takes a gully washer storming into an infected and paralyzed soul, to wash away the past, dissolving it into a present turmoiled enough to open a space to cure and open space for some fresh future.
As I started writing this lines an actual mass of water ended a world as a lot of souls knew it ....the Tsunami that followed the brutal earthquake in Japan on March 11. No one living in this sublunar world can boast that the life they have is safeguarded against change. Sometimes blessings come in ways we pray God not to suffer them, yet His perfect plan is there for those who survived as for those who did not.
On the aftermath of the deluge, the rainbow was a visual symbol that there was a promise that Humanity would never be destroyed. Annihilation was out of the program, but so was the utopia of Arcadia.
Good has a way of filtering in the cracks and fissures of apparent evil. Light is trapped by gross matter. It takes a disaster to test the mettle of the human soul. I remember how many young people were shaken out their comfortable nihilism by the earthquake that destroyed a good section of Mexico City in 1985. The national crisis became a wake up call and many lives were born again to service and life. I was one of them.
Japan will rise again. Thousands are doing their very best in the face of what happened showing that takes a split second decision to shift from being part of the problem to be part of the solution. Since then, deep into May, the world has kept being shaken as it had since the first day after Creation. And the choice is simple: either you go full of fear and divide or you set to join efforts to rebuild. One attitude "as far as the East is from the West" as the phrase of the Psalm in the song by Casting Crowns. The world has no use for those in the first group. But desperately need all into the second one.
Where there is no bridge over troubled waters, those, the indispensable, are becoming one.
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